Dear Deadly: How Do I Price My Book?

Dear Deadly,

I’m getting pretty close to publishing my book and am considering a .pdf distribution along with print as you do with your products.

Obviously there is some concern for a small publisher for releasing something as .pdf not least losing potential sales. If I recall correctly your personal view is that this constitutes free advertising. Have your opinions changed and or do you place any protections on your .pdfs?

Secondly, given that there’s no way I will probably ever recoup the time I put into producing my game how do you set a price? $25 feels right to me (225-250 pages A4 with pictures and original art) but that’s without doing market research and so forth. Printing costs are ~$10 per book.

On PDFs, my opinions haven’t changed. “Protections” (i.e., restrictions) on PDFs only end up punishing the paying customer, in the long run. They get cracked by the pirates. Better to offer a restriction-free, more positive experience to the customer. For a lot of folks that’s a perspective akin to religion (be you for or against), so I’m going to leave that topic there.

Onward to pricing.

So, at $10 per book I’m assuming you’re doing very small or individual book-by-book print runs, because at volume you should be able to get a price considerably lower than that. (In fact, with Lightning Source, you could probably do more like $7 per unit, after $75 or so in set up costs, and that’s at an individually priced level, with volume discounts kicking in at as few as 50-100 copies. I’m assuming we’re talking *black and white* interior here, and paperback, when I make that assessment.)

At any rate, with a $10 book cost, $25 is your bare minimum, but good enough if you know for sure that you’ll only ever be selling the copies yourself, as directly as possible to consumers. If you want to start selling into retail, that $25 pricepoint won’t do you any favors vis a vis your costs. I sell into distribution, which means I get about 40% of my cover price (sometimes a tad more) not counting any free shipping subsidy I offer for volume orders. Sometimes I sell straight to retail at a 50% of cover price. So looking at your $25 MSRP, we’re talking a range of $10 to $12.50 of income (not counting any expenses of making that sale and getting it to the customer) vs. a cost of $10, so between $0 and $2.50 of profit (10% in your best case retail scenario).

The way “traditional” publishing tends to do the pricing calculation is to apply a multiplier to the printing cost. That multiplier is a slider depending on individual publisher philosophy, but if you put ‘em all in a blender you’d probably see that averaging out to at least 4. Making the book you’re talking about a $40 item, tho, will probably price it too high for consumer willingness. Faced with this, trad pub goes to push that unit cost down as far as possible. The folks pricing similar books at $25 may well be getting them printed for around $5 — which, given the distro/retail scenario I used above, is a profit range of $5 to $7.50, or 20-30%, aka doubling or tripling the margin.

Bottom line for the TL;DR set: Before you worry too much about pricing your book, shop around on your printing options.